'A library? So the creep can read…' Eric stepped inside, keeping his movements quiet. 'Maybe he keeps his magic notes here — or whatever warlocks call them.'
He knew the type. Witches, warlocks — scribbling spells and twisted theories into whatever pages they could bind.
Mad scholars carved out of their own obsession, brilliant yet utterly divorced from anything human.
Which worked just fine for him.
Even in another world, books meant knowledge — and knowledge had to count for something. Maybe, just maybe, he could figure out how this place worked… or what he had become.
But the moment his foot crossed the threshold, something clicked.
A split second later, a spike shot up from the floor, punching clean through his foot. A faint hiss followed as a thin ribbon of purple liquid oozed along the metal tip.
Eric stared down at it, more surprised than anything else. The spike jutted straight through his dead flesh, gleaming under the dim torchlight.
'Seriously? A booby trap. In a library.'
He crouched, wrapped his fingers around the spike, and yanked it free without hesitation — one benefit of feeling no pain. He turned it over, watching the sheen of purple fluid shimmer across the metal.
Poison. Obviously.
'Guess he didn't want visitors. Good thing poison doesn't work on the dead.'
He tossed the spike aside and focused on what actually mattered.
Books. Shelves full of them — some ancient and brittle, others bound in strange materials he didn't recognize. The air smelled of dust, ink, and the faint residue of magic.
He stepped deeper in, scanning titles. To his surprise — maybe even relief — he could read them. Somehow, the words made sense.
Most were written in a looping, unfamiliar script, but one stood out — the letters crisp and clear.
Undead Physiology.
Eric froze.
'Well… that's convenient. Or very, very bad.'
Eric took the book and settled at the reading table. A matchbox lay beside a half-burnt candle; he struck a match, the flame hissing to life before dipping into the wick. Warm light flickered across the pages.
And so he began to read — hoping for answers, maybe even a way to undo whatever curse had sealed him into this rotting shell.
The first pages looked harmless enough: crisp paragraphs treating undeath like an academic discipline.
Categories. Classifications. "Practical applications."
Eric skimmed, expecting archaic rambling, but the clarity unsettled him. Whoever wrote this knew far too much.
As he read deeper, the pages darkened. The paper yellowed into a bruised brown, and the ink shifted into something thicker — something that looked disturbingly like dried blood pressed into the fibers.
A faint, sickly smell of rot clung to the pages, though he wasn't sure whether it came from the book… or from him.
Halfway through, an isolated heading appeared on a nearly blank sheet. The letters were jagged, carved hard enough to tear the paper.
Zombies
The lowest and most primitive form of the undead.
The text below read like a cold, clinical manual.
Zombies are bodies without will. Thoughtless. Empty. Their flesh remembers movement, nothing more. They are puppets strung by invisible hands.
The process begins with the taking of a soul — a living soul — stolen and devoured by the necromancer who seeks to command death.
Once consumed, the body becomes hollow, a vessel without purpose. Into that emptiness, the master plants a shard of their own will, forcing the corpse to rise and obey.
A zombie cannot think. It cannot question. It moves only when commanded. It kills only because a master wills it.
And when the flesh decays beyond use — when it can no longer walk, crawl, or drag itself forward — the will within frays and dissolves, leaving nothing but a collapsing heap of rot that once resembled a person.
At the bottom of the page, in smaller, uneven handwriting — darker than ink, as though scorched into the parchment — someone had added a note not part of the original text.
"Those who perform this ritual pay a price. The soul that feeds upon another forfeits its place beyond death."
"No heaven will open for it. No hell will claim it. When the body dies, the spirit does not pass on — it lingers, trapped between both realms, unseen, unheard, unremembered. It wanders until the last corpse it raised crumbles into dust."
So that was why he could think freely — his soul wasn't from this world.
When the warlock consumed the soul meant for this corpse, Eric's foreign spirit must have slipped into the empty vessel in the aftermath of the ritual. It explained everything — why he could think while the others wandered in blank, shuffling silence.
'Now… is there a way to undo this ritual and turn back into a human?'
He turned the pages quickly, eyes scanning faded ink and torn parchment, searching for anything that hinted at salvation. Then he saw a section titled Breaking the Bond.
According to the text, to sever a necromancer's control, one simply had to destroy the caster. Once the master died, the link of command snapped, allowing the undead to regain its free will.
For a brief moment, Eric's hollow chest felt lighter.
There was a way out — or so he thought.
Then he kept reading.
When the master died, the body returned to its natural state: death.
The undead only moved because a warlock's will held the corpse upright. Remove that command, and the body collapsed — no movement, no awareness, no imitation of life. Nothing.
Eric's faint hope cracked… then crumbled entirely.
The next lines buried it with grim finality: once a person was remade through necromancy, there was no path back. No rituals. No blessings. No prayer. Nothing in any form of magic could rebuild what had been stripped away.
He leaned back, staring blankly at the page.
'So that's it,' he thought. 'Even if I kill the bastard, I'll still be stuck like this.'
The candle's flame flickered, and the light danced in his dull, gray eyes.
'No cure. No turning back. Just a walking corpse.'
He closed the book slowly. The weight of it felt like a verdict settling over him — heavy, cold, and absolute.
'Doomed to rot in this body forever… great.'
*****
A/N: If you're enjoying the story, don't forget to add it to your library and follow for more chapters!